March 23, 1999

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Middle East

As Yasser Arafat comes to Washington again this week, the pattern of the Clinton Administration’s tilt against Israel in its Middle East policy is becoming more pronounced than ever.

At the Wye Plantation last October, Israel agreed to soften the terms for the Palestinian Authority's compliance with the Oslo peace accords, including waiving the requirement that the Palestinian National Congress formally vote to remove from the PLO charter the section calling for Israel's destruction. Yet, after lowering the bar, the Palestinian Authority (PA) still has not lived up to its remaining obligations. The PA pledged that it would develop plans for collecting weapons from within its territory and then share those plans with Israel. It hasn't. The PA pledged it would shrink the size of its police and security force in the territories to a reasonable size. It hasn't. The PA pledged it would vet the names of prisoners with U.S. authorities to determine whether they were terrorists or not before releasing them. It hasn't. The PA pledged it would outlaw the terrorist cells operating within its purview. It hasn't.

In spite of this record, the Clinton Administration has repeatedly praised the PA for its efforts to meet its Wye Plantation obligations and has announced that it will disburse $400 million in aid promised the PA for supposedly carrying out its end of the bargain. In the meantime, Defense Secretary William Cohen announced in Tel Aviv ten days ago that Israel would not receive any of its new aid until it had fulfilled its Wye Plantation obligations, leaving Israel in the bind of redeploying its forces in the West Bank in the absence of PA compliance with the above security commitments or of foregoing needed assistance.

In the past, American diplomatic practice was not to meet with the representatives of the PLO at all given its avowed intent to destroy Israel by any and all means possible. This policy changed as successive U.S. administrations argued that the PLO had become a legitimate interlocutor with Israel in "the peace process." Under the Clinton Administration, however, this willingness to meet with the PLO was transformed into a policy of coupling meetings with Israeli official to talks with analogous PA figures. America's once special relationship with democratic Israel has been put aside for one of virtual reciprocity between it and the PLO.

Yet there is a question of whether the administration's policy can even be called evenhanded. Arafat's visit this week is the second he will have made to the U.S. in two months. Meanwhile, the U.S. is limiting contact with senior Israeli government ministers. The ostensible reason for keeping Israel at a distance is that the administration wants to avoid appearing involved in Israel's domestic affairs during an election season. But, of course, the administration's fastidiousness here is something new. President Clinton was more than willing to visit Israel in 1996 when the Labor government he favored needed an electoral boost.

All of this fudging on behalf of the Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority by the Clinton Administration is designed to keep "the peace process" going. But at what cost to the one true friend we have in the region?

The process certainly hasn't brought peace. Chairman Arafat and the PA are determined to declare Palestine an independent state on or after May 4 and they continue to advocate violence to get their way. The administration has made much of the fact that Arafat twice stated at the Wye signing that the Palestinians would never leave the peace process and would never return to violence and a policy of confrontation. The first of these pledges may well in fact be true. Why abandon a process in which one is not held accountable for a failure to keep a promise and one is continually being accomodated in an effort to make it appear that the process itself is still on track?

Not surprisingly, the administration's policy of appeasement and moral equivocation has not produced the preconditions for a satisfactory solution to the problem of the Palestinians and the West Bank. To the contrary, it has only helped fuel Palestinian ambitions about statehood, expanding territorial claims, and establishing Jerusalem as its capital. The result: a coming May train wreck in which Israel will have gained neither security nor peace.